Employers. Stop treating the minimum wage like a maximum wage!

It’s time for the business owners of this land to stop treating the minimum wage like some sort of maximum wage.

The delicatessen owner who is charging £18.95 for beans on toast needs to get it into his or her thick skull that the poor bastard making £4.20 an hour because they had the misfortune to be born after 2002 (why employ anyone older – such an extravagance) would struggle to rent a fridge-freezer box underneath Southend Pier at that salary – Universal Credit or otherwise.

The sums don’t look too good for older adults either.

To top it all off, you then stand there and wonder why your employee seems to lack motivation and drive.

You moan for weeks on end about the council and the government taking an almighty shit on you from a great height, so why the hell do you think you can get away with doing the same? ‘Because I can’ really isn’t a valid argument.

I have lost count of the number of young people who have told me that these ‘minimum wage, maximum grief’ positions are often sold with the promise of prospects for promotion in the future.

Unfortunately they haven’t realised yet that most supervisor positions are basically about 70p an hour more, with the only qualification criteria being that the successful applicant has been in the job for fifteen minutes longer than anyone else and are willing to basically have twice as much responsibility.

Away from retail, there are even carers out there who are earning minimum wage or similar.

Carers. People whose clients could literally die if they don’t make it to them. Their life in your hands for about seven quid an hour.

The pièce de résistance? There are genuinely people out there who voted Leave because they want the whole employment thing deregulated even further.

What the hell are you going to be paying people with? Magic beans? Perhaps those blue passports will come in handy after all when we are all forced to start battering each other in the queue for soup.

Maybe it’s just time to get away with the whole concept of wages and salaries and get people to do jobs for ‘the exposure’ or ‘word of mouth.’ EDF and nPower accept that now, don’t they?

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